Friday, January 16, 2009

Pro-Hamas Supporters Rampage In Nice, France

It's just not news anymore, is it: another European anti-Israel protest deteriorates into a winner-take-all rampage. The backdrops change, but the story doesn't.

This latest riot erupted in, of all places, the coastal city of Nice, along the French Riviera. Last Saturday, January 10th, hundreds of the participating 5,000 protestors deviated from their pre-arranged marching route through the downtown core; the result was smashed cars, broken windows, looted shops, terrified innocent bystanders and assaults on outmaneuvered police with rains of stones and other projectiles. The report in the Nice Premium calls it "virtual guerilla warfare" [my translation]:

Approximately 200 youths set upon the Casino Rulh and the McDonald's, then went over to place Masséna. What followed was two long hours of thrown stones, or other objects against [store] windows or cars that were driving by. Police responded with tear gas, affecting both rioters and passersby.... In the middle of the chaos, merchants had no choice but to close down their doors... locking themselves in with their customers. They found themselves trapped inside for about an hour and a half.

Another newspaper, the Nice Matin, adds that several police were wounded in the assault against them, and that a baby can be included among the injured pedestrians. A baby...

My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszów. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam Deputy Speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Army Major Livovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, eight hundred Palestinians. The total is now a thousand. She replied instantly, "Five hundred of them were militants." That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

It's pointless to express personal views in face of the blind, partisan rhetoric that spews from this site.

The generic response from the parrots here is propagandist and screams disconnection as it's laughably obvious that non one writing here has ever been to war, least of all fired a weapon at someone with the intention to kill, or have one fired back at them.

Thank God that all this rag is, is a partisan playground for some seriously frustrated cowards whose 'activism' doesn't go past standing outside of a library congratulating one another on their 'bravery' for defending what they believe.

This site would be great humour if you didn't all take yourselves so seriously. The fact that you do is more pitiable.

In layman's terms, all covenantzone is a circle-jerk of people most likely in the field of education who will never hold office, own a business, publish or do anything that actually requires a firm grasp on reality (not to mention ability.)

Charles, truepeers, Dag...I say to you all, wholeheartedly, and with no reservation, go fuck yourselves.

you are the one who takes yourself seriously. as i've told you before, we just blog with few other pretensions. But you, after being told you are not welcome here, have some fixation by which you need to build us up into the image of your great inferior in order to anonymously blow us off. Can you really take yourself seriously. We have expressly requested you not share our company. Thus your F.O. is only the sign of a seriously disturbed man obsessed with those he recognizes are of no import. We will have to keep deleting your posts; what a hassle.

Hey Vancity.... I didn't know that one needs to hold public office, own a business, or publish something in order to have a valid opinion. I'm just guessing on the number here, but by this logic the views of 99% of the public are not valid. Perhaps you would advocate a change in Canadian law so that only polatitians, shop owners and authors can vote.

Just in case anyone was wondering, the comments at 9.12 and 9.54 came from the same IP address, which, for the record, is 24.84.56.# (Shaw, Vancouver), and from a computer with the same configuration:Operating System Microsoft WinNTBrowser FirefoxMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5Javascript version 1.5Monitor Resolution : 1440 x 900Color Depth : 32 bits

The comments at 7.44, 7.48 and 8.00 all come from the same visitor, and from a computer with the exact same configuration as above but a different Shaw IP address (70.79.15.#) (how often do they change, was he using the neighbor's signal?)

Being such terribly astute bloggers, we don't get too many visitors; they're easy to keep track of.

I deleted one of my above comments; in the passion of the moment it was too hyperbolic and not what I really believe about what Israel wants with Gaza. Here's a re-write:

Anyone who would compare Warsaw and Gaza has a disturbed sense of history. Some Israelis would like nothing better than to fully leave Gaza, put up a wall and have nothing ever again to do with the Gazan people who, some feel, should be part of Egypt. Other Israelis will recognize an obligation to be ready for the renewal of human reciprocity at whatever level that becomes possible, entertaining various visions of future states. Very few, and none in great authority, dream of wiping out Gazans.

The Arabs have been attacking Israel continuously since before it was formed, with expressly eliminationist rhetoric. Seriously, what do you expect Israeli people to do? Don't the losers have any responsibilty for their actions and those who are getting killed? What is the definition of someone who can't stop fighting no matter how many of his own people he gets killed?

If the Israelis were like the Nazis, after sixty years there'd probably be no Palestinians. They arguably have the means. But you will see, if you care to look, that the population of Gaza, and other places in the Middle East, has gone up tenfold (literally) in the last sixty years. Western food and medicine and technology is largely the cause of that.

People who feel they need to use the symbolism of the Holocaust to make a point, probably can't make a point worth making. Reality is not their forte.

I went down to the At Gallery today to witness an anti-Israel/pro-Terrorism protest, but there was no protest. I could have sworn I saw an announcement on some lefty blog that there would be one. I suppose I was mistaken. I wasn’t the only one. There was a guy with an Apartheid sign of some sort rolled up, a green and white flag of some sort rolled up, and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Cornelius from Planet of the Apes on it. Or was it Che Guevara? It is hard to tell from a distance. (Yes, I borrowed that joke from American Dad.) He looked like he was psyched for a rally, video camera in hand. He must have been disappointed.

My trip downtown was not a waste, however. There was an activist on the Robson side of the Art Gallery holding a quieter demonstration and collecting signatures aimed at stopping Iranian human rights violations and terrorism. Examples of human rights abuses shown on his information boards included a photograph of two Iranian homosexuals aged 16 and 18 right before they were executed in a public hanging for their “crime.” (Ahmadinejad was not lying when he said there were no homosexuals in Iran. There are none because he has them all killed.) As I sipped my coffee I couldn’t help but wonder where all the so called “humanitarians” were who we always see turning out to protest Israel’s supposed human rights violations. I spent several years in university and took many liberal arts courses. I have socialized with, studied with, worked with, played with, partied with, argued with, even dated and loved left leaning people. I know the lefty mantras as well as they do. Surely they are against ALL human rights violations, not just those they assign to Israel. But I didn’t see any of them out supporting this activist today. These days I rarely see them gather against any human rights causes with the same passion and on the same scale that they do when they gather to condemn Israel. Not even for the fashionable causes such as the genocide in Darfur (I was at the Darfur rallies these past two summers, so yes, I can comment). This double standard is difficult to make sense of. Why do they look at one country under a microscope, but not hold other nations to the same standard that they hold Israel to?

As I finished my now iced coffee and headed home a conclusion I came to long ago was reinforced. The absence of the anti-Israel protesters in front of the Art Gallery today is evidence of their hypocrisy, and of their strong anti-Semitic bias. They are not truly concerned about human rights. They think that they are, but they are not. If they were they would rally against ALL human right violations with the same vigor that they use against Israel. And if they were then they would also condemn Hamas human rights violations at their rallies. I can’t put my finger on what exactly they do stand for, but it is NOT human rights. That is just a lot of hot air.

Thanks for the report; it's good to know they didn't show up today. I'm not sure why but perhaps we're seeing the present limit to how much their resentment really motivates them.

The hypocrisy you discuss is something many of us have tried to get our heads around. To my way of thinking, we need to see why Israel is just much more significant in their world view than other places. I don't think many of the contemporary left, if faced with the question, would say they support human rights violations in Iran, or anywhere else. But the mere existence of such violations is, as you note, not enough to get many people onto the streets.

So why is it the crimes of Israel, the US, and then other lesser Western countries that get the most attention? And, among the non-Western countries why does China get probably the most attention of activists?

It's because countries that are truly behind the times don't matter because they can't do much to change the global dynamics. Their neighbors might care, but for the rest of the world, there can be endless butchery in central Africa and people just try to ignore it or shake their heads at something that seems beyond us in its primitiveness. We could really only have an effect over there if we imposed our power in that world in a major way; and that is precisely what the left can not allow. They are still living the "post-colonial" moment (not that they are completely divorced from various patronizing relationships with the third world).

Some people and some countries are more historically significant than others. Some countries must take the lead in shaping our shared future. And this is what annoys people so much about Israel, I think. (On one level we can say this is antisemitism - resentment of the Jews' particular role in history - but I think it's worth noting that it's antisemitism of a kind that is particular to our times.)

If Israel is being realistic about its own security there is a definite limit to how much it can defer to the UN or other transnational (post-national) organizations. Israel has to act without their ok in order to try, through deterrence and punishment, to put some doubt and divisions in the Arab world's attempts to focus all its resentments on the Satanic Jews. Israel has to try to create the start of some Arab movement that will seek to recognize Israel and negotiate its security in realistic ways.

So Israel has to act, it has to take risks, it has to try to start shaping the future without deferring to the postmodern consensus which is that no one has the right to act unless and until the proposed action has been mediated to death by all the organizations who see it as their duty to make sure nothing happens in this world that could create the scandal of more victimization. Victims in Sudan don't matter as much because they are victims of a primitve world; what matters are victims of modernity, victims of the cutting edge of history. What motivates the left is to protest the advance of history, the "cutting edge", now that they have given up the old faith that the working class would inherit the future. Now that people see the triumph of liberal market society and its ongoing globalization a lot of people think it is this that has to be opposed, or more precisely the "bad" parts of this process, all that we can deem to be scandalous about it. Everything must be controlled so nothing bad happens; in effect, this means nothing of great significance must be allowed to happen.

Activists are on the lookout for the victims of the modern global order. Children making Nike shoes is a good scandal to occupy one's free time or career; children making sandals from re-used tires in some third-world country are not really of interest, though it's probably great that they have jobs recycling. Victims of a modern army like Israel make for a good scandal (especially given the age-old resentment of things Jewish); much larger numbers of victims of a primitive tribalism with AK47s is much less of a scandal.

ONe further thing: what bothers people about Israel is that it is the epitome of a nation-state, and one that can only probably survive if it remains predominantly Jewish. It represents the cause of self-ruling nations vs. those who dream of a post-national one-world global order run by experts and elites. Thus when Israel takes decisive, deadly action on its behalf, it is really getting in the face of all those who don't want to defend their own nations, to defend the old normal, but want some Utopian vision of a world without borders: Israel is an insult to all who think John Lennon's "Imagine" a great song.

And since it is realistic to believe that the future can only be seriously built by free nations interacting in a truly inter-national order, Israel gets in the way of a lot of fantasies and a lot of fears that most of humanity can't deal with the hard work of freedom and self-rule in a constitutional democracy.